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                        <h1 style="text-align: center" class="maincontent">Outliers Chapter 1</h1>
                        <p class="maincontent timestamp">Published at Mar 16, 2021</p>
                        <p class="maincontent">In <i>Outliers Chapter 1</i>, the author presents the Matthew Effect to us. Gladwell opens the chapter with a seemingly innocuous description of a Canadian hockey player’s rise to the top of the sport in Canada. A young boy has talent as a child, is found by a talent scout, and works hard to rise to the top of the Canadian hockey meritocracy. His individual merit is the reason for his success. Players succeed because they perform well, and succeed on the basis of their own superior ability—nothing else matters, in the end. Gladwell then asks us: is this really the case?</p>
                        <p class="maincontent">Gladwell gives us his general thesis, the argument of his book in broad strokes: he will point out that there is something “profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.” We often attribute success to a rare and triumphant collection of individual qualities—talent, motivation, genius—when in fact, success stories (successful outliers) feature people who are “the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies” that enable their success. He offers us the following analogy: the tallest tree in the forest came from a good seed—this is not in question. But it did not become the tallest tree in the forest simply because it grew from a good seed; it became the tallest tree because it was planted in good soil and because no other trees blocked its sunlight. </p>
                        <p class="maincontent">Gladwell directs his reader’s attention to a 2007 roster for the Medicine Hat Tigers, an elite Canadian youth hockey team. He tells us that Roger Barnesly, a Canadian Psychologist, looked at this roster and noticed that an overwhelming number of players were born in January, February, or March. And, conversely, there were very few players on the team born between October and December. The same pattern persisted elsewhere on other teams. Gladwell rewrites a play-by-play of the championship game of the Memorial Cup, a major hockey tournament, using players’ birthdays instead of names. The resulting transcript makes the unusual prevalence of January, February and March birthdays exceedingly clear. </p>
                        <p class="maincontent">Gladwell gives us a simple explanation for this strange phenomenon: the cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1st. The difference in strength and ability between someone who is almost eleven-years-old and someone who has just turned ten is significant. These bigger, older players make an impression on talent scouts at a young age. Then they are moved to better teams, receive better coaches, have more opportunities to practice—and this makes them better. Similar trends are seen in some of the more popular youth sports in other countries: Baseball in the US and soccer throughout Europe all tend to feature players with birthdays right after the cut-off date on the best and most elite teams. </p>
                        <p class="license">The passage was published under CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Please go to <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">creativecommons.org</a> for more details. </p>
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